Katya & The Prince of Siam

One might well have thought that with so many queens and the Inside brimming with willing young creatures, whom a word from the King would bring to his bed, that no one woman in particular would be cherished above all others. But in addition to her titles and public position, there are many more charming and intimate mementoes of Chulalongkorn’s special and abiding love for Saowabha, such as joint portraits and many ornaments and pieces of jewellery with entwined initials.

To quote Malcolm Smith again: ‘Chakrabongse was always first favourite both with his Father and Mother. Much was expected of him, for he was regarded as the ablest as well as the handsomest of all the sons. With his dictatorial ways, his determination and his abounding energy, he was to me the only chip off the old block in the family. In complexion he was unusually pale, and his features had little of the Siamese type of countenance …‘. This last point would seem to be wishful thinking on Smith’s part as in fact the prince had a dark complexion occasioned by frequent exposure to the sun during army duties.

 

Seated from left: Crown Prince Maha Vajirunhis, the Tsarevitch, King Chulalongkorn. Taken at Bang Pa-In Summer Palace.

 

In 1893 the Tsarevitch – the future Tsar Nicholas II – who had been visiting India, arrived in Bangkok. Although no two men could have been less alike than the diffident future Emperor and the genial Chulalongkorn, perhaps partly because they were so dissimilar, a mutual liking sprang up between them which later ripened into a firm friendship .

The Tsarevitch was gratified by his welcome and the charm and beauty of Saranrom Palace with its wonderfully attentive servants put at the disposal of him and his suite. He marvelled especially at the curtains hung at his windows, made of multi-coloured freshly gathered flowers, sewn together with astonishing skill and renewed daily during his stay.

Despite a life of intense and demanding activity, Chulalongkorn also found time for agreeable diversions such as a picnic – employing the English word – though the event had little in common with the simple meal in the open air or even the far grander aristocratic picnic, waited on by flunkies in England. For one thing, a picnic in Siam might last several weeks, when three or four thousand people set out in six hundred boats, each rowed by a dozen men standing to their oars like gondoliers. At nightfall, the party would land to be housed in pavilions, built to last but a day, some beautified by the entrancing curtains composed of flowers that had so impressed the Tsarevitch.

Sometimes a smaller party – a mere four or five hundred strong – would cruise in the royal yacht down the Gulf of Siam. Canvas screens on each deck divided the Outside from the Inside, but once ashore on the tiny uninhabited island of the Gulf, the ladies of the Inside enjoyed perfect freedom, roaming in the woodlands and bathing with their children in the pellucid waters of the little coves.

There were also less highly organised escapades when the King, like a prince from the Arabian Nights, – stories which he loved and some of which he translated – would move freely among his subjects in disguise, landing with a band of close friends from small paddle-boats in remote villages where they might attend a peasant’s wedding or dine unrecognised at his table. These expeditions pleased Chulalongkorn mightily. So much so that in about 1902, on the further side of a canal called the Jade Basin, flanking the most delightful of his many palaces, Vimanmek, he constructed Ruan Ton. This was a group of modest traditional houses – a latter-day Petit Trianon – where, after leaving the palace dressed as usual, the King could assume a commoner’s clothes, and move about his realm as an ordinary man. Sometimes the friends he made on these occasions were invited to a delicious meal cooked by their Sovereign, the dish-washing being expertly performed afterwards by the highest ranking nobility. For although regarded as a divinity and waited on hand and foot, Chulalongkorn was an expert cook and even wrote a cookery book!

He also found opportunity to see much of his many children, who often sat beside him at meal times or on the steps of his throne, though here they had to bear in mind, they might have to answer sudden searching questions about their studies which, if unsatisfactory, meant disgrace and demotion to a lower step.

Moreover, despite the enormous weight of state affairs and the many other matters demanding his constant attention, those of his sons being educated abroad received regular letters from him, in one of which he advised: ‘The notion that you have been princes and can be comfortable in life without doing useful work is one which does not place you above the lower animals which come into life, eat and die!’